Forbes Lists

Profile

Groupon, Inc. (Groupon) is a local e-commerce marketplace that connects merchants to consumers by offering goods and services at a discount. Each day the Company e-mails its subscribers discounted offers for goods and services that are targeted by location and personal preferences. Consumers also access its deals directly through its Websites and mobile applications. The Company operates in two segments: North America, which represents the United States and Canada; and International, which represents the rest of its global operations. Customers purchase Groupons from the Company and redeem them with its merchants. As of September 30, 2011, the Company featured deals from over 190,000 merchants worldwide across over 190 categories of goods and services. Groupon primarily addresses the worldwide local commerce markets in the leisure, recreation, foodservice and retail sectors. In February 2012, the Company announced the launch of Groupon Thailand. [...] more

More on Forbes

It has been more than a decade since Wang Xing quit school to found his own company, and the 36-year-old serial entrepreneur has had his share of failures. In 2005, Wang and his two friends copied Facebook and launched social networking site Xiaonei in China. But they were forced to sell it in less than a year due to financing problems (It was read »

You’ve probably heard that popular piece of conventional wisdom that says human beings don’t change. I don’t know if this is actually true in practice, but it makes me wonder: if people don’t change, and businesses are made of people, why does it seem like so many companies lose their way?

As the city approaches financial bankruptcy, Chicago’s elite’s line-their-pockets with taxpayer money.

There is real pain in Chicago. In the last four years, 10,000 shootings have left the city scarred. Nearly 21,000 students are trapped in failing schools. Homeowners face rising property taxes – monthly property tax read »

Predictive analytics is perhaps the biggest trend occurring today in the sales and marketing space. While it sounds like rocket science, predictive analytics is actually a pretty simple idea – harness all the internal and external data that an organization has access to, aggregate all that data, run it through an analytics engine and generate read »

The timing of the collapse of City Link, one of the UK’s biggest parcel delivery firms, could not have been much worse; administrators moved in on Christmas Eve 2014 and an announcement followed on Christmas day that the Company had failed. A last minute bid from an unnamed consortium that “undervalued the company” and offered “no money up read »

The Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly the buzzword of the year. And with good reason. We are rapidly reaching a point where the convergence of ubiquitous connectivity, smart devices, cheap sensors and cloud services delivers the ability to enable incredible combined value. We’ve been hearing for years about how connected devices and read »

The founder of Groupon, Andrew Mason, has introduced a new app that offers “awesome” GPS walking tours: “Groupon was trying to create a catalyst for people to get out of the house and experience their city. This is kind of just a read »

We all know it’s easier to keep an existing customer than it is to win a new one. But too often, that insight gets forgotten as businesses focus obsessively on new customer acquisition – a pursuit Noah Fleming, author of Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty that Keeps Your Business Thriving, likens to a sex read »

Disruption in any space usually begins with a smaller shift from a first mover that becomes a catalyst for competition and significant, long-term change. Often, resulting in entirely new markets. “Compiling data in new ways after throwing everything at the wall, finding key experiences that are important and then moving the information online, read »

A service that took every prototype and made it successful would get a fair amount of media buzz, and none without trying. At the moment, I cannot predict just how much because of other things to consider: news that day, if journalists respond to their Inboxes, frequency of that read »

Chatting with Simdul Shagaya is like an intense, super-charged colloquy on doing business….in Africa. “We are the custodians of the dreams of the middle-class of Africa,” Shagaya emphasized repeatedly, as he talked about his fast-growing e-commerce company, Konga.com, that he founded just 2 years ago, July 2012. read »

The most recent short interest data was recently released by the NASDAQ for the 12/15/2014 settlement date, and Groupon Inc. (NASD: GRPN) is one of the most shorted stocks of the Russell 3000, based on 6.44 “days to cover” versus the median component at 5.32. There are a number of ways to look at short data, but one metric that we find read »

“Eat more fresh whipped cream” was probably my most successful New Year resolution of all time, but that was way back in 2002. Truthfully, I’m less likely to embark on self-improvement because of an arbitrary date and more likely after something calamitous has happened, like the time I devoured a 2-pound bread pudding over three days and read »